Well, this is interesting

[beautifulduckweed]

Today's meals were much more carb-heavy than normal, in an effort to eat more cheaply and to decrease my meat consumption--a decent amount of rice (I want to make clear that, while somewhat more rice than I'd normally eat, it's a perfectly reasonable quantity), with a bit of chicken and a bunch of kale.

My body isn't happy with me. I am, in fact, displaying a lot of the symptoms of somebody with diabetes: I've been hungry all day, I'm horribly thirsty all the time, and as a consequence of the insane amount of water I've been drinking, I can't stop peeing. Hooray osmotic pressure on the fritz!

So, scratch that plan, then. I'm going to fry eggs to add to my lunches, double up the quantity of chicken and decrease the amount of rice in my portions. It's interesting, because I don't get these symptoms when I eat, say, ice-cream (and the kind I favor is mostly fat and relatively low in sugar); it seems to be a couple of big starch-heavy meals in a row inducing these symptoms. I've been consistently eating a protein-heavy diet for the past 17 or so years, and my body really isn't happy with me making this abrupt switch.

My body really, really wants a huge bowl of ice-cream right now. I'm ignoring it, eating a chicken sausage instead and hoping my blood sugar will normalize by tomorrow. Sigh.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Wuhhh, insatiably hunger, thirsty all the time, non-stop peeing... diabetes? wtf!? umm. internet-research time. crap! :(

[misshepeshu.livejournal.com]

Dear Anonymous Commenter who may or may not be a friend of mine who just forgot to sign into their account:

Polyphagia, polyuria and polydipsia are the three classic symptoms of diabetes. The polyphagia is due to insulin resistance and your body mistakenly thinking it wants more sugar. The polyuria is due to incomplete glucose resorption in the kidneys, and the resulting increased osmotic pressure in the kidneys interferes with water resorption, which basically means you pee a whole lot more instead of passing the water back to your body, and your body has to draw water from the surrounding cells to counteract. This, in turn, dehydrates you and makes you feel thirsty, so you drink a hell of a lot more.

::Cue "The More You Know" star::

[jennekirby.livejournal.com]

Those symptoms or things like them happen to me whenever I significantly change my diet--in any direction. For me it might be the lack of gallbladder (my body produces a specific amount of bile every day based on how much fat I've been eating recently, so if it changes it all goes to hell), but I suspect even with a gallbladder it can get horribly confused when the fat content of your diet changes drastically. You might be able to do it gradually, one meal at a time, though.

(Says the girl who is alllllmost done taking off the pounds she put on eating a cheap, carb-heavy diet post-wedding who has given up on the idea.)

[misshepeshu.livejournal.com]

It weirds me out that I'm relatively young and relatively healthy, but my body can't seem to deal with a minor, if abrupt, diet switch.

My mom has Type II diabetes despite being a healthy weight, and she got it from her mother (my grandmother died of kidney complications due to untreated diabetes that went undiagnosed for a very, very long time--probably decades). My dad's mother had Type II diabetes, but she was clinically obese. In short: it runs in my family, so I need to watch it. Sigh.

[lilithsaintcrow.livejournal.com]

Are you eating white rice? That's pretty high on the glycemic index, yanno. Does this happen when you eat starch that's lower on the index--brown rice, frex?

The Muffin is diabetic, and one of the hardest things has been weaning him from sticky white rice, since he grew up on the stuff and brown rice is seen as declasse. *sigh* But I put my foot down and he started having an easier time controlling his blood sugar after he wasn't whacking it upside the head with the white rice every day.

I would never have thought to finger RICE as the culprit, but his doctor swore. Weird, ennit?

[misshepeshu.livejournal.com]

Yes, I eat white rice--jasmine, to be specific. And yeah, I know it's really high on the glycemic index (together with potatoes and friggin' CARROTS, among other things). What I've found is that it's not so much the absolute quantity that's important, but the ratios of the various macronutrients. Yesterday, I ate about as much rice as I did the day I made this post, but I about doubled the quantity of protein, and I did just fine. So it seems that protein to carb ratio is key. Ice-cream doesn't seem to set this off, but cake does, so I suspect a fat-to-carb ratio at work, too.